seasoned with salt," can be regarded as a proverb.

Howell himself, however, elsewhere recognises this quality of the proverb. In a sonnet with which he prefaces his collection of proverbs (Proverbs or Old Said Saws and Adages), he says:

"The people's voice the voice of God we call;

And what are proverbs but the people's voice,

Coined first and current made by com

mon choice?

Then sure they must have weight and truth withal."

Add this idea of popularity to the "sense, shortness, and salt," and, though we cannot keep up the alliteration, we get perhaps the best possible concise definition of the proverb.

Among the longer lexicographical definitions of the proverb, that of the

Century Dictionary seems to me among the best, if not the very best: "A short pithy sentence, often repeated colloquially, expressing a well-known truth, or a common fact ascertained by experience or observation; a popular saying which briefly and forcibly expresses some practical precept; an adage; a wise saw; often set forth in the guise of metaphor and in the form of rime, and sometimes alliterative."

This, however, would be better without the reference to the synonyms, adage and saw. Under aphorism the same dictionary mentions and discusses at considerable length the following dozen of synonyms: "Aphorism, axiom, maxim, precept, dictum, apothegm, saying, adage, proverb, truism, byword, saw," all of which

66

concur in expressing a pithy general

proposition, usually in one short sentence." I need not quote the entire discussion, as the work is generally accessible and the precise meaning of some of the words will be obvious to every intelligent reader without consulting it. Of course the special "note" of the adage is that it is old as well as wise ("Necessity knows no law," and the like); the byword is "commonly used in disparagement"; the dictum is "an opinion given with authority."

The saw is said to be "a contemptuous term for an expression more common than wise; often a trite or foolish saying reiterated to wearisomeness." The word is seldom used nowadays except in formal or familiar quotations from old writers. They sometimes refer to it, or make their characters refer to it, more or less contemptu

ously; like Chaucer's Wife of Bath, who, when her husband has been quoting proverbs from the Bible to her, says:

66

But all for nought, I sette not an hawe Of his proverbes, ne of his olde sawe."

But Piers Plowman refers to "Salomones sawes (Solomon's proverbs); and one of the medieval York Plays addresses God thus: "And all thi sawes thou will maynteyne " (thy promises or decrees). Spenser, in Colin Clout, says:

"So love is Lord of all the world by right, And rules the creatures by his powerfull saw."

Shakespeare employs the word in a distinctively complimentary sense in his quotation from Marlowe (As You Like It, iii. 5. 32):

"Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might,

'Who ever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight?'"

In 2 Hen. VI. i. 3, 61, we find "holy saws of sacred writ." Shakespeare uses the word eight times, and I shall allude to the other instances in the Notes at the end of the book. He also has adage (twice), maxim (once), and proverb (eighteen times), besides the verb proverb (once), which is also used by Chaucer (Troilus, iii. 293):

"For which these wise clerkes that ben dede

Han ever this proverbed to us yonge, That the firste vertu is to kepe tonge;"

and Milton (S. A. 203):

“Am I not sung and proverbed for a fool In every street?"